This Magnificent Dappled Sea

by David Biro

He peered through the lens and adjusted the focus until the blood cells began to materialize, red and blue and shades in between, different shapes and sizes, representing distinct lineages and stages of development. In all these years, it never failed to amaze him, this magnificent dappled sea of bone marrow, ever regenerating and replenishing itself in an ongoing cycle that made life possible—red cells that carried oxygen to the tissues, white cells that fought off infection, and platelets that made the blood clot. Magnificent.

For the past three months, they’d been so intent on the minute details of the transplant—monitoring the fever charts and blood counts, watching for signs of infection—that they hadn’t considered the person who made it all possible. They hadn’t, but Luca had. “He’s inside me now, Nina. I can feel it.” “You can?” Again, Nina was struck by the boy’s words. Yet the more she thought about it, the more they didn’t seem so far-fetched. Luca was no longer only Luca. He was—what did Tosti call it?—a chimera, a mixture or hybrid, like the creatures in Greek myths. There was, in a sense, another person inside him—someone else’s living stem cells that had traveled over mountains and across oceans to enter his body. She wondered if all transplant recipients felt this way or just the more imaginative ones.

One thing Luca was certain about, no matter how old or different he might be, it didn’t feel weird to have Joseph Neiman’s marrow inside him, even when Luca lived on one side of the world and this man on the other. Even when he was Catholic and this man Jewish, a priest of the Jews who had never received the sacrament or communion.

She would never forget what Luca said—that after the transplant, he felt like his marrow donor was living inside him, that all his blood donors were living inside him, that she was living inside him. The truth was Nina felt the same way about Luca, that he was now part of her. “For so long,” she said, “I’ve been wrapped up in my own little world, thinking only of myself and my silly concerns. There are so many other things to consider, so many more important things.

Luca was a mixture of different races and cultures—that’s why he had no problems getting along in New York and why he could empathize with so many different patients at the hospital. He was a living, breathing example of the pluralism that we should all aspire to. But maybe the muddling had a downside. Sarah had once objected to raising Samuel in a mixed community rather than the Orthodox one she’d grown up in. If everyone’s perspective is equally right, she warned her husband, then there is no absolute right, and everything goes. It could leave you without bearings, adrift and lost.

I kept returning to that article in the Columbia Magazine on stem cell homing, how complicated and precarious the process was, the many different points at which it could go awry. What if a stem cell never reached home or ended up at the wrong home or recognized too many homes as home?